BY GLENN GARVIN
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS/MCT

When The CW last spring canceled "Everybody Hates Chris" and let "The Game" move over to BET, it created a startling gap: For the first time in nobody-can-remember-how-many years, there wasn’t a single Black family sitcom on broadcast television.

A network staple ever since Diahann Carroll broke the color barrier in 1968 with "Julia" was, to borrow a perhaps infelicitous phrase, gone with the wind.

Extinction, however, didn’t last long. Fox has debuted two Black sitcoms – and at least one of them is likely to stick around, if for no other reason than it’s a cartoon produced by Seth MacFarlane.

‘Cleveland Show’
airs Sundays

MacFarlane’s other two Fox cartoon series, "Family Guy" and "American Dad," have 14 years on the air between them and are both already renewed at least until 2012, so there’s no reason to think his monomaniacal fans won’t latch onto "The Cleveland Show" (8:30 p.m. Sundays) the way they have to the others.

All the more so because "The Cleveland Show" is a spin-off of "Family Guy." Cleveland Brown, one of the lower-key characters from that show, now moves to center stage with his rambling, disjointed monologues.

‘Brothers’
focuses on
dysfunctional kin

"Brothers" (8 p.m. Fridays) is more conventional. Former NFL defensive lineman Michael Strahan, showing a surprising natural flair for comedy, joins Daryl "Chill" Mitchell ("Ed"), Carl Weathers (the "Rocky" films) and CCH Pounder ("The Shield") in this tale of a loudly dysfunctional family on the mend.

Thirtysomething brothers Strahan and Mitchell have long been bitterly estranged over the responsibility for an accident that left Mitchell in a wheelchair.

But with the economy pounding the family finances and dad Weathers showing the first signs of Alzheimer’s (including obsessive worry over the potential for cheetah attacks in their suburban Houston neighborhood), Strahan moves home for the first time in 10 years.

Pounder keeps
men in line

After a long stretch of hilarious mutual heckling, the brothers start bonding again.

Everybody in "Brothers" is funny, but the unquestioned star of the show is Pounder, a rapturous mix of menace and guile in the struggle to keep her men in line. She even regularly sticks a fork in Mitchell’s paralyzed legs to see if he’s faking it.

Though in one of "Brothers’" occasional poignant moments that leaven the brawling, she quietly explains why: "Because I dream that one day, he’s going to say ouch."